Jerry Fahrni

Author: Jerry Fahrni

  • Cool Pharmacy Technology – Eyecon Visual Counting System

    It’s hard to imagine that pharmacies still manually count medications and pour them into bottle for distribution to patients, but it goes on all the time. Even large pharmacies that have robotic dispensing systems still have to manually dispense a fair number of medications for one reason or another.

    Eyecon by RxMedic is an automated counting system for oral medications that uses barcode scanning technology and “machine vision” to ensure accurate medication dispensing.

    Some things that I thought were interesting about Eyecon:

    • It uses barcode scanning technology to ensure that the correct medication is being used, i.e. Eyecon scans the medication barcode against the prescription label. When used properly this a good way to prevent putting the wrong drug in the patient’s bottle.
    • Use of “machine vision” to perform counting. I’m not entirely sure what “machine vision” technology is, but I hear the term often enough; especially when looking at compounding robots. According to the company, Eyecon can “detect pill fragments or foreign matter in the counting platter and alert the operator”. That’s a nice feature.
    • There are separate trays for “sulfa” and “penicillin”. You frequently see tray segregation like this in outpatient pharmacies due to fear of cross contamination and patient allergies. This little feature tells me that the person that designed Eyecon has practical experience in a pharmacy.

    Couple of Eyecon videos below. The first shows a general overview of Eyecon from 2010. The second shows Eyecon being used to fill a prescription using barcode scanning technology. There are several videos posted on YouTube. Just search for “Eyecon”.
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  • Saturday morning coffee [November 29, 2014]

    “Old pharmacist’s never die….they just lose their potency” ~Dave Walker via Twitter

    So much happens each and every week, and it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

    MUG_SMC
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  • RxADMIX – a semiautomated manual system for compounding sterile preparations

    RxADMIX has been around for a while. I first mentioned it back in September of 2012 (Cool Pharmacy Technology – RxAdmix).

    Mark and I initially had RxADMIX pegged for inclusion in our report, In the Clean Room, but after several failed attempts to reach the company for information we removed them from our list. That’s a real shame. I thought the company had gone under, but it it appears that RxADMIX is alive and well. I found the YouTube video below, posted on October 31 2014, a couple weeks ago. It looks like the company is doing a bit of new marketing.

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  • Pharmacies and RFID

    RFID technology is intriguing in many ways. It offers some advantages over bar code scanning technology, but then again it tends to be more costly and labor intensive. I’ve always thought RFID technology would find significant use in pharmacy practice, but that hasn’t happened. It has found some niche areas in healthcare, but not to the extent that I thought it would.

    I read two RFID articles over the weekend, and on the surface they appear to be in stark contrast. But after giving it some thought I’m not so sure that’s entirely true.
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  • Interesting developments in robotic IV preparation overseas

    One of the unexpected benefits of writing In the Clean Room has been the interest that it has generated outside the U.S. Mark and I have had some interesting conversations with people from all over the world as a result.

    One of our colleagues from Germany shared these interesting new developments from overseas. All three of the “robots” listed below are designed for compounding hazardous drugs, i.e. chemotherapy. The number of different approaches and concepts used for robotic sterile preparation is amazing.

    PharmaHelp from Fresenius Kabi
    Basically a hood with built-in automated compounded technology. The concept appears to be focused on batch preparation driven by workflow management software. The process is aided by RFID and gravimetric technology.* PharmHelp reminds me of a combination of the EXACTAMIX Compounder and INTELLIFILL I.V. There is a video at the site, but I couldn’t find a way to embed it here.

    KIRO Oncology from KIRO (Mondragon)
    Two things of interest with KIRO Oncology: 1) Dual-armed approach. The use of two robotic arms makes sense as one of the current limitations to the compounding robots I’ve seen in the U.S. is the use of a single arm. The use of a single arm creates a rate-limiting step, 2) It is “self-cleaning”. Check the video below, “self-cleaning” starts at about 1:35.

    MOTOMAN from YASKAWA (Japan)
    A MOTOMAN dual arm robot from YASKAWA. Again, dual-arm approach. I’d like to see more video on this guy as the video below isn’t very good. When I do a web search for MOTOMAN I find mostly industrial use robots. Not sure how far they are with using their technology in the IV room.

     

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    *It’s important to note that not all countries utilize bar code scanning technology like we do in the U.S. The FDA did us a big favor when they required drug manufacturers to place bar codes on medications. Not so in other countries. Many drug products in other countries do not contain bar codes.

  • Bar-Coded Medication Preparation for Chemotherapy [article]

    The September 2014 issue of Pharmacy Purchasing & Products contains an article on the use of bar code scanning during the preparation of compounded sterile products (CSPs).  The article touches on some of the topics that Mark and I cover in our report, In the Clean Room; errors in the IV room, bar code scanning during medication preparation, image capture, remote verification, and so on.

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  • Lexicomp’s new Drug ID mobile module [video]

    Lexicomp has a new Drug ID module for their suite of mobile applications.

    Based on the Tweet I thought the new application would identify “loose drugs” with the camera on a mobile device like Medsnap, but that’s not the case.
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  • In the Clean Room: A Review of Technology-Assisted Sterile Compounding Systems in the US [report]

    For the better part of the past year I’ve been working on a project with Mark Neuenschwander of The Neuenschwander Company looking at technologies used in pharmacy clean rooms to prepare sterile compounds.

    The research into this area took much longer than originally anticipated. We discovered along the way that this subject is much more complex than it appears on the surface. Information is difficult to find, some of the technologies are little more than marketing material on a company website, and the subject matter is in its infancy.
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  • Saturday morning coffee [October 4, 2014]

    “Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right, decide on what you think is right and stick to it.” ~George Eliot

    So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

    The mug below comes straight from a little shop in the French Quarter in New Orleans. My wife and I were recently there for a few days while I attended a conference. We had a great time. The food, the people, the atmosphere, all good. We ate a lot of good food, include beignets and my first ever muffaletta.

    MUG_NOLA2
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  • I returned my Moto 360 and here’s why

    I felt fortunate when I received an email from Motorola inviting me to be an early purchaser of a Moto 360 smartwatch. Thrilled is more accurate. In my opinion the 360 is probably the best looking of  all the new Android Wear watches. I jumped at the opportunity.

    Moto 360
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